While no company can be fully operational one hundred percent of the time, the success of an e-business can be significantly enhanced by obtaining a “dial-tone reliability” level at the Internet server. This refers to the level of reliability that most Americans have come to expect when they pick up their telephones. As competition among e-business vendors increases, maintaining an acceptable website response time will be crucial. For example, it has been established that e-business can lose customers if it cannot maintain an “eight-second” website response time. That is, the website should respond to a user request for access within about 8 seconds, or the customer may click and navigate somewhere else in the World Wide Web. According to Zona Research, “internet companies in the U.S. lose more than $4 billion each year from purchases that are not made because customers found web sites too slow.”
The difficulty in maintaining an acceptable website response time is exacerbated during periods of unpredictable and dramatically changing traffic levels. In some cases, unusually high traffic levels can lead to outright website failure. This can be a financial disaster when the increase in traffic was the result of a successful and expensive advertising or promotional campaign undertaken by the e-business itself. For a brick and mortar business, an increased number of interested customers simply increases the length of cash-register lines. Eager customers seeing the long lines realize that the business is booming, and often decide to return later even if they are not interested enough to wait in line at that time. But in the e-business world, customers experiencing access delays get no positive feedback; they just click elsewhere and often forget about the unavailable site. To make matters worse, at present no effective way to predict a traffic-related system failure or slowdown in the near-term exists. Thus, an e-business can suffer a disastrous system failure or slowdown even though it has invested in the best network equipment, and has no reason to suspect that it is unprepared for the level of network traffic that it is about to experience.
In an attempt to address these problems, several companies have developed software applications that monitor network and component performance. The products offered by these companies are often referred to as “monitoring agents.” The monitoring agents presently include Mercury Interactive, Tivoli, Desktalk Systems, Avesta Technologies, FirstSense Software, Manage.com, Keynote Systems, ProActive Net, Net IQ, Hewlett Packard, BMC Software, MicroMuse, Concord Software, and VitalSigns Software. The various monitoring agent programs offered by these vendors monitor activity and performance at the application, network, and system levels. These tools provide the e-business operator with real-time information regarding the performance for the system as a whole, and for discrete components within the system.
Although these products provide real-time monitoring information, they are ineffective in translating the measured performance data into accurate near-term predictions of future network performance. The unavailability of accurate near-term predictions of future network performance results in a “blind spot” that lasts from about −1 to 24 hours. In other words, no matter how current the measured performance information may be, the e-business operator still lacks an accurate estimate of its system's performance for the next business day. The resulting e-business blind spot leaves them vulnerable to unexpected system failures or slowdowns, especially when traffic levels increase rapidly.
Thus, there is a continuing need for a forecasting system that is capable of producing accurate near-term predictions of future network performance for e-business systems and system components. There is a further need for systems that are capable of automatically responding to near-term predictions of future network performance to proactively manage the system and prevent system failures and slowdowns due to increased traffic levels. Finally, there is a need to effectively display the actual and forecasted network performance.